16 is the New 13 and Meta Vs Nudify Apps
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Earlier this month Meta expressed support for a Digital Majority Age proposal in the EU which requires parental approval for social media app downloads for teens under 16 with age verification done “at the app store or operating system level.”
🎙️ Across the globe we’re seeing a minimum age shift for social media from 13 to 16. Australia recently passed an under-16 social media ban, and the US has tried to update online privacy laws to match. The EU’s Digital Majority Age proposal is preferable for Meta because the financial and technical burden of age verification would fall to Apple or Google.
Meta filed a lawsuit against Joy Timeline HK Limited in June for efforts to “circumvent Meta’s ad review process.” According to Meta, the defendant’s app, CrushAI, is one of the many “so-called ‘nudify’ apps, which use AI to create fake non-consensual nude or sexually explicit images.”
🎙️ With overwhelming bipartisan support, Congress passed the Take it Down Act in April and President Trump signed the bill into law on May 19, 2025. The law makes knowingly sharing or even threatening to share non-consensual intimate images (NCII) a federal crime, whether authentic or AI-generated. It also requires platforms to remove NCII within 48 hours after being notified.
In May, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) released 2024 data that revealed CyberTipline increases for both AI-generated NCII and financial sextortion.
🎙️ The NCMEC has a Take it Down website to help adolescent victims of online NCII sharing. They also receive 100 financial sextortion reports every day and know of “at least 36 teenage boys who have taken their lives because they were victimized by sextortion” since 2021. Awareness is vital.
Researchers from Stanford studied interactions with AI therapy chatbots and found they “may not only lack effectiveness compared to human therapists but could also contribute to harmful stigma and dangerous responses.”
🎙️ People are interacting with AI chatbots now commonly seeking love, companionship, and advice, but at their core, chatbots are just pattern predictors. They are autocomplete on steroids and many times incredibly sycophantic and enabling. Therapy and companionship are best left to humans.
In case you missed it, we highlight the three illusions of social media and introduce our four guiding principles for Know Curtains and our family’s tech adoption: But They Were All of Them Deceived.